Publications

Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over…

Despite growing antibiotic resistance, the clinical drug development pipeline for antibiotics has been sparse largely because of an unsustainable business model. We illustrate three models to accelerate antibiotic development, using Medicare new…

Randomized experiments have become important tools in empirical research. In a completely randomized treatment-control experiment, the simple difference in means of the outcome is un-biased for the average treatment effect, and covariate…

We present a new estimator for causal effects with panel data that builds on insights behind the widely used difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods. Relative to these methods we find, both theoretically and empirically, that this…

We use financial disclosures to develop a novel proxy for net operating loss carryforward (NOL) tax benefits. This approach more accurately identifies firms with tax losses, more precisely measures the tax loss, and better predicts reductions in…

This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the trade-offs between consumption versus norm conformity and choosing from a menu of default (pre-selected) options versus opting to compute a preferred non-menu choice. In the theoretical model…

Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city — defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide…

Whom do individuals blame for intergroup conflict? Do people attribute responsibility for intergroup conflict to the in-group or the out-group? Theoretically integrating the literatures on intergroup relations, moral psychology, and judgment and…

In their insightful comment, DellaPosta and Davoodi argue that our finding (Goldberg and Stein 2018) that segmented networks inhibit cultural differentiation does not generalize to large networks. However, their demonstration rests on an…

We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we…

Transparency of quality in the healthcare sector primarily aims to facilitate patients’ care decisions, however, it also provides useful information to competing healthcare providers. We study how competitors respond to increased transparency…

We propose and analyze a recipient-anonymous stochastic routing model to study a fundamental trade-off between anonymity and routing delay. An agent wants to quickly reach a goal vertex in a network through a sequence of routing actions, whereas…

Debates on capitalism get muddled by blind spots about essential institutions, particularly effective governments and legal systems that enable corporations to exist in their current form and markets to succeed at scale. Across regimes,…

The trend to incorporate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) matters into corporate boardrooms and capital markets is pervasive. Nevertheless, considerable uncertainty exists over what ESG is, how it should be implemented, and its…

We discuss “Economic Consequences of Mandatory Auditor Reporting to Bank Regulators” by Balakrishnan, De George, Ertan, and Scobie (BDES, in this issue). BDES concludes that a key benefit of mandatory auditor reporting to bank regulators is…

I incorporate computational constraints into decision theory in order to capture how cognitive limitations affect behavior. I impose an axiom of computational tractability that only rules out behaviors that are thought to be fundamentally hard. I…

We study the hierarchy of communities in real-world networks under a generic stochastic block model, in which the connection probabilities are structured in a binary tree. Under such model, a standard recursive bi-partitioning algorithm is…

In this article we first summarize the specific plans articulated by seven major corporations for reducing their Corporate Carbon Footprints (abbreviated as CCF from hereon). Our sample is not intended to be representative of the broader…

Executive bonus plans often incorporate performance measures that exclude particular costs — a practice we refer to as “cost shielding.” We predict that boards use cost shielding to mitigate underinvestment and insulate new managers from the…

We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we…